Marking Time
by Bejai
Summary: "I have a time machine," Clara said, "and for once I am going to use it for responsible grown-up things." Clara catches up on her marking. The Doctor helps. Sort of.


"I am so far behind on my marking," Adrian groaned with a sigh, shaking his head as he walked down the hall of Coal Hill School with Clara Oswald.

"Oh, me too," Clara said with a rueful laugh. "I have papers from the start of term I haven't even looked at yet. And next weekend is the museum overnighter, so I'll get even more behind."

"Well," Adrian said, "if I ever invent a time machine, I'll let you know. That would certainly make the marking easier!"

Clara laughed, perhaps a bit too loudly. "Bit of a waste of a time machine, yeah?"

"Oh, I don't know," Adrian sighed wistfully. "An extra Sunday now and then would be lovely."

* * *

The Doctor blinked. "You need an extra ... Sunday?"

"Right," Clara said breezily. "An extra day, no distractions, no commitments, absolutely no running, and I could finally get on top of my marking."

"You really just want to sit in the Tardis and mark children's school assignments?" the Doctor clarified slowly, apparently needing a moment to wrap his head around the request.

"Yes. One of the other teachers mentioned that that is what he would do if he had a time machine. And it occurred to me that I have a time machine-"

"- _I_ have a time machine," the Doctor interrupted.

"Shush," Clara continued, "I have a time machine, and for once I am going to use it for responsible grown-up things." When it looked like the a Doctor was about to complain, she whirled around and poked him hard in the chest.

"Ow," he murmured, rubbing the spot where she had thumped him.

"So, here is what you are going to do." Clara began to recite her detailed plan: "You will pick me up tomorrow at eight o'clock in the morning. I will then take you to breakfast. On Earth. In this decade. Paris, maybe. I will then undertake my marking for however long it takes to complete. You will not interrupt me or attempt to tell me stories about the time you helped Shakespeare write _Hamlet_."

"Funny story, that-" the Doctor started.

Clara ignored him. "You will then take me to dinner at a time and place of your choosing. Oh, but it must be warm. And by a beach. And have excellent wine. You might want to pop back and make a reservation, because I expect you to impress me. I'll then have a good night sleep on the Tardis, and you will drop me back at home at precisely 8:12 on the same Sunday morning you picked me up. I will then have a remaining, gloriously marking-free Sunday, and I will, for once, be relaxed and guilt-free on Monday morning."

"Is that all it takes to be guilt free?" the Doctor asked sarcastically. "If only I'd known."

"Are you clear on the plan?" Clara asked.

The Doctor gestured aimlessly into the air. "What if I already had plans? You don't usually travel with me on Sundays. Maybe I had plans to go to church with her Holiness Pope Mary IV."

Clara lifted an eyebrow.

"I'm clear on the plan," the Doctor said petulantly.

"Right then, off you pop," Clara said, shooing him into the Tardis. "See you tomorrow morning!"

* * *

"Doctor," Clara said with a sigh, "I said 8 a.m., not 6 a.m."

"Did you now?" the Doctor said with feigned innocence. "I forgot which one you said. Ah well, better get an early start, what with all your marking."

"You did not forget," Clara said, burrowing her head back into her pillow. "You came straight from last night. So it's been about ten seconds for you. Ten seconds since I gave you very specific instructions about how today was going to go."

The Doctor frowned. "How did you know?"

"You're wearing the same coat." The Doctor cocked his head at her in puzzlement. It was always the same coat. "Actually, I guessed." Clara said smugly.

"Well, I'm hungry," the Doctor said, shaking Clara's bed. "Up, up, up! You promised me breakfast."

* * *

As annoying as the early wake-up call had been, it really wouldn't hurt to get a head start. The Doctor's eyes had widened at her tremendous pile of marking, which she had dumped on his desk under the Tardis console. They had breakfast (Paris, 2019), and the Doctor parked the Tardis in the Vortex. Clara set out her red pen, her blue pen, her sheet of smiley-faced stickers, took at deep breath, and picked up the first paper. It was an assignment from four weeks ago to compose a journal entry about the student's idea of an ideal weekend.

_Darrell White, Year 7. My idel weekend wud be if my mum wud bring me chips and let me watch the telly. _

Ugh. Clara shook her head, and then jumped as the Doctor appeared at her side. "Are you seriously just going to sit down here and mark papers?" he asked.

"Yes!" Clara hissed at him. "Go away!"

"What am I supposed to do?" the Doctor whined.

Clara gathered her patience. "What do you usually do on Sundays?" she asked.

"I usually skip Sundays."

Clara rolled her eyes. "Well then, you can bring me tea," she said, and went back to her work. The Doctor stomped off, muttering something about fetching things for bossy midgets.

Ten minutes later, he was back with her tea. "You know," he said, annoyed, "in most of the universe I am a very important person, not an errand boy. Respected. Feared. I have been the Lord President of the High Council of the Time Lords, Keeper of the Legacy of Rassilon, Defender of the Laws of Time and Protector of Gallifrey. The Bringer of Darkness, the Oncoming Storm, Ka Faraq Gatri, the Destroyer of Worlds. The Renegade, the Predator, the Great Scourge-"

"-the Fetcher of Tea?" Clara interrupted, smiling up at him, trying to rattle him off his diatribe. "Is one of your names 'The Fetcher of Tea'? Because if not, that really is an oversight." She sipped her drink. "Good tea, well done. Go away."

"You're very welcome," he said sarcastically, and moved to stomp off again.

"No, wait," Clara said, grabbing his sleeve. She could feel his mood slipping. It was hard to find the line with him. Sometimes it seemed like he wanted a good bicker, both of them taking clever swipes at each other. Other times, he went dark on her, and started to direct cruel vitriol onto himself. "Seriously, thank you. For the tea, for the time machine. For the extra day."

He looked at her hand on his arm. "You're welcome," he said gently. He extricated his arm, his mood more jovial again. "Now stop bothering me and do your marking."

* * *

Two hours later, Clara had made a small dent in her marking. She needed a stretch, the bathroom, and more tea. And she needed to find the Doctor, because she hadn't heard a peep from him since he'd brought the tea. It was very suspicious.

She stretched as she walked up the staircase, her spine giving a satisfying crack. She glanced around the console room, and spotted the Doctor in his chair on the upper level. There was a stack of books on the floor beside him, and one slipping from his fingers.

He was asleep.

It occurred to her, with a jolt of guilt, that perhaps the thing that the Doctor did on Sundays was sleep. She hadn't seen him asleep since he'd been knocked unconscious by something - or nothing - in Orson Pink's time capsule. And the time before that, he had passed out in the aftermath of severe regeneration shock, tucked into bed in borrowed Victorian nightclothes. Both times had been frightening, and neither had been proper sleep. This wasn't really either, him all wadded up in a chair, but as near to it as she'd seen.

She indulged herself for a moment and studied his face. Sometimes, it was easy to pretend that he wasn't an alien. Just her time traveling, self important, self loathing, brilliant, manic, intractable friend. Asleep, though, she couldn't mistake him for human. It wasn't that he looked particularly different, but without his usual animation, he felt different. He'd gone still and ancient and timeless. It was like sitting in the shadow of a mountain, and wondering how in the name of creation you thought that the mountain might be interested in bringing you tea and hearing about your marking.

She shook her head, but the image wouldn't shake, and walked softly so as not to wake him.

* * *

He came tromping down the stairs about an hour later, hiding a yawn. "The mountain awakens," Clara murmured. The Doctor gave her a quizzical look.

"I wasn't asleep," the Doctor protested.

"Yes you were. I saw you. And it is weird that you deny being asleep, but don't deny being a mountain."

"I really have no idea what you are talking about," the Doctor said, eyeing the large piles of paper surrounding Clara. "So I stopped listening. You have been at this for hours. Are you seriously not done yet?"

"About half way," Clara sighed. The Doctor groaned, and snatched a handful of papers off the top of a stack.

"Fine. I'll help," he said. "Otherwise we'll be stuck here for eternity."

"Oh, no no no," Clara said, pulling the papers out of his hands and smoothing them back onto the pile. "I am not letting you near the children's English assignments."

"I am terrific at English," the Doctor huffed. "I invented English. And if I help you, we'll get done with this drudgery at least eight times as fast and we can go do something interesting."

Clara rolled her eyes and handed him part of a stack. "Fine. Misspellings, mark in red. Errors in grammar, mark in blue."

"Misspellings in what language?" the Doctor asked.

Clara stared at him. "English. Because I am an English teacher."

"What dialect?"

"British English."

"What era?"

"Seriously?"

"It makes a big difference. Maybe they are writing in Old English: '_Wealdend woroldare forgeaf, _

_Beowulf wæs breme'_"-

Clara sighed noisily. "Twenty. First. Century."

"Early Twenty First or late Twenty First?" The Doctor clutched the papers to his chest as Clara reached forward to grab them from him, her eyes narrowing. "Okay, okay, I've got it," the Doctor said defensively. "Misspellings red, grammar mistakes blue."

Silence fell for a moment. The Doctor squinted at the paper in his hand, then turned it 90 degrees. "Are you sure this is English?" he asked. "It appears unintelligible. Even the Tardis can't translate. Did you give pens to a mob of maundering monkeys by mistake?"

"Quit being a baby. The handwriting isn't that bad," Clara said shortly, and glanced at the paper the Doctor was trying to interpret. "Oh. That's Bobby Quinn. It is that bad. Here, take another," she said, and traded papers with him.

Three second later, he interrupted her again, aghast. "What is this assignment?"

She glanced at his papers. "That one? We start every class with a ten minute fast writing assignment. I think this one is 'write your best idea for changing the world.'"

"Well, this boy," the Doctor looked at the paper, "Kevin Forrest, says that he has an idea to fix global warming: use rockets to move the Earth away from the sun. You can't just go around blasting planets out of their orbits! It isn't even an original idea, but a fairly horrific weapon called a planetary system disrupter. They are universally banned throughout the civilized universe. Why doesn't he just write about recycling or reducing carbon emissions, instead of inventing a planet destroyer?"

Clara didn't look up from her marking. "We are not judging their ideas, just their use of language. Write 'interesting idea' at the top of the paper, and move on."

"You want me to encourage him!?" the Doctor gasped. "Oh, that's just terrific. And then, someday, when historians are looking at what inspired the evil weapons designer Kevin Forrest, they'll dig up his old school assignments and see that someone told him that building a system disrupter was an 'interesting idea.' And then they'll say 'hmm, that looks like the Doctor's handwriting.' And I could really do without another genocide on my conscience."

Clara slammed her pen down. "Believe me, Kevin Forrest is not going to be a weapons designer. He'll be lucky to be an assistant manager at a shop."

The Doctor gaped at her. "Well, that's how this sort of thing starts, doesn't it? Evil inventors are always underestimated, aren't they? They use it as inspiration for their evil plots."

Clara held out her hand. "Give me the assignment. I'll mark it."

"I can't just ignore this!"

"Give. It. Here," Clara ground out, "and move on to the next paper."

"Fine," the Doctor huffed, handing her the assignment. "On your head be it." He plucked the next assignment off of the pile and started to read it. "Clarise Arte. 'My idea to change the world is ...' oh, no no no, pudding brain! That will never work!"

"Doctor!" Clara shouted. "You are not helping!"

* * *

Clara had demoted the Doctor to holding her pens. In apparent protest, he was flat on his back on the floor beside her chair, the pens resting on his chest until called for. He was staring vacantly into the space above him, his hands absently drawing ghostly Gallifreyan equations into the air.

Clara sighed. "Is this what you do every Sunday?"

"There is no such thing as Sunday," the Doctor replied from the floor. "Humanity arbitrarily breaks apart their solar year into week-sized bits and names one-seventh of their days Sunday. That's got nothing to do with me."

"So, do you just skip from Wednesday to Wednesday, then?" Clara asked.

"No such thing as Wednesday either."

"That's not what I was asking. What I'm asking is whether-"

The Doctor continued her thought: "-whether I skip all the days between our trips? Drop you off, and jump the Tardis straight to our next trip? A week for you, seconds for me?" he smiled and tilted his head to catch her eye. "Sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes it is seconds. Sometimes days. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes-" he broke off before he finished the thought.

Clara swallowed. "Years?" she asked, remembering her angry words to him after the Moon. It made her queasy to think how long he may have stayed away.

"Years, decades, centuries," the Doctor admitted. "I have a hard time keeping track. I try, because it always seems important to humans. 'How old are you?' or 'how long have you been gone?' You lot always want to know. I can generally say it in a way that makes sense to you, but there is really no such thing as a linear scale of time. Your subjective day-month-year measurements are just a temporal illusion caused by your perspective."

"It sure feels real," Clara laughed, rolling her eyes. He was distracting her from her work, but he didn't do this very often. The term 'time traveler' was too simplistic to apply to the Doctor. Clara was a time traveler. The Doctor was ... well, a time lord, able to perceive time in a way that he didn't often even try to explain. And when he did try, it usually involved hand waving about 'wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.'

Clara set aside her marking. "Okay," she said patiently, "then what is the proper way to measure time?"

The Doctor sat up and scratched his head. "That isn't even a question. The correct question is...where was your purple jumper 4.5 billion years ago?"

Clara looked down at her jumper which was, indeed, purple. She shrugged.

"4.5 billion years ago your jumper didn't exist," the Doctor continued. "It was just dust, which had been cast off by a supernova about three billion years before that. And gravity drew the dust together until it created your boringly stable yellow sun and your trouble-magnet of a little world. And at some point, the dust from a supernova became your purple jumper."

"Amazing jumper, this," Clara murmured.

"So," the Doctor continued, "trying to explain the true nature of time is like trying to explain that I can taste the purple color of your jumper in the drifting dust that existed in space before your world was formed."

"Oh," Clara said, a little subdued.

"And then you can forget that example," the Doctor continued, "because it isn't remotely like that at all." The Doctor lay back down on the floor. "There isn't any way to measure time. It is infinite." He frowned at Clara's rueful look. "That said," he groaned, "I feel like we may run out of it before you are done marking your papers."

* * *

"Sunday morning, 8:12 local time," the Doctor announced as the Tardis came to rest in Clara's bedroom. Clara darted out the door with an armful of papers.

"Don't go anywhere," she called, "I have a couple more stacks I need to grab." The Doctor snorted, and watched her run in and out. She had inadvertently left one stack on the jump seat, but he didn't say anything about it.

Her work done, Clara smiled gleefully up at him. "Now for my bonus Sunday! I feel like I've stolen a day."

"It isn't a bonus day," the Doctor grumped. "just a day spent out of order. I can't add a single extra day to your life, you know. Yesterday will be deducted from your lifetime allotment."

"Heart and soul, you are," Clara said, her smile fading.

The Doctor rubbed his face. "Sorry, I get maudlin when I lie around the Tardis. What are you going to do today?" He asked with forced cheerfulness.

"Brunch with Danny, a walk in the park. Maybe some shopping. Relax." She shrugged. "Whatever strikes my fancy. What will you do with today, Doctor?"

He'd grimaced at the mention of brunch with Danny, then lifted his eyebrows in surprise at her question. "Probably just lie around on the Tardis," he admitted.

"Doctor ..." Clara said, her voiced pitched to make his name a one-word rebuke.

He smirked at her. "I'm joking," he said. "I'll go blow up some monsters, or start a revolution, or something."

"Much better," she laughed.

"Now, get out of here. Enjoy your day," the Doctor said, shooing her out.

"I know it doesn't exist, but see you Wednesday!" she called over her shoulder, closing the door behind her with a click.

The Doctor flipped the dematerialization circuit, and blew out a breath as he looked around the empty console room. He lowered himself to the floor, and lay back, staring up at the turning rotors. "Bonus day," he murmured. He folded in his hands across his chest, and fought the urge to jump straight to next Wednesday.

Notes: I got to thinking about Clara's marking on the Tardis in In the Forest of the Night. All of space and time in a big blue box ... and Clara uses it to catch up on her marking? Then again, the last time you wished for a time machine, wasn't it for some mundane reason?


End file.
